“We should call Kit.”
“He’s overseas, Mom. I’ll tell him the next time he calls.”
“Where is he stationed now?”
“I’ve told you a hundred times: he’s doing one of those things he can’t talk about.”
“Kit can help. We need a man in the house. Why doesn’t he move home, anyway?”
“Don’t worry, I can take care of this,” said Staci, running her hand through her mom’s unkempt gray hair and then giving her a gentle kiss on top of the head.
“Staci, someone has stolen all of our money. Please call Kit.”
Staci checked her chronograph: 8:00 A.M. Pacific Time meant it was 7:00 P.M. in Moscow. The timing was probably okay. Kit would be calling in a few hours, anyway, as he did every day without fail since the plane crash that left him as the sole “man of the house.” She knew she was only to call him if there was an emergency, using the encrypted satellite phone, or sat phone, he had given her. As she thought about it, she figured this qualified, even if her brother was involved in some kind of black ops. Having spent several years in the army herself, including a stint in Iraq, she knew better than to ever ask her brother what he really did.
Staci could take care of the damage control well enough with all of the financial institutions; it would be a time-consuming mess, but she’d do it and do it well. She took no offense at her mom’s insistence on notifying her big brother. A day never went by that Gina didn’t ask Kit to please move back home and live with her and Staci. An extremely close-knit family had been torn apart the day her dad and younger brother died in that crash. Selfishly, a part of Staci would like Kit to come home, too, and help ease the burden of being Gina’s sole caregiver.
Yes, the view from the window was murky; sometimes you needed help to remember to look up and find the blue sky.
“You’re right, Mom. I’ll call Kit.”
Staci knew that Kit had friends at the NSA, National Security Agency, and those freaky geeks could do virtually anything in the digital world they wanted to. Congressional oversight? Court orders? Search warrants? The politicians wanted people to believe that all of the snooping was legal and about terrorism, but oversight was a gray area at best, and Washington power politics was a constant exercise in abuse of power. The more spying that was allowed in the name of “keeping Americans safe,” the more risk every citizen ran of becoming a target in the crosshairs of a government agency or employee or politician with an agenda; it happened frequently, regardless of what the politicians or the press led the public to believe.
But the flip side of the coin for Staci was that Kit’s cyber-warrior pals would indeed abuse the system to find the jerk who did this, and then make them pay. So she crossed to the desk and dialed a number into the sat phone.
Just back from a long workday, Major Kit Bennings stood at the foot of his bed and, with no wasted movement, changed out of the civilian clothes—slacks, dress shirt, and tie—that he usually wore while on duty as an assistant defense attaché at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. He could faintly hear his roommates arguing over a game of cards in the main room of their shared apartment off Voykova Street in the Golovinsky District.
His three roomies were army personnel posted to the embassy. Careful scheduling assured that at least one of them was always present in the ground-floor corner apartment, thus preventing agents of the Russian intelligence agencies from ever gaining surreptitious access and bugging the place, as they did at most American government workers’ living quarters in Moscow. Bennings turned up the volume on his digital music player, and the chords of “Boom Boom” by legendary bluesman John Lee Hooker filled his room and masked the indistinct chatter of his roomies.
Bennings’s quarters were a safe room within a safe house; from the exterior, no one could see the bricked-up windows and floors and walls lined with lead. Or the trapdoor leading to a secret tunnel down below.
Kit sat heavily at a small vanity. Recent stress and fatigue lines and dark circles had become fixtures under his thirty-five-year-old brown eyes, indicating a need for more sleep and relaxation. In a preventative effort to fight off the enervating migraines that sometimes plagued him, he used reflexology on himself and dug his right thumb hard into a pressure point on his hand. He winced from the sharp pain but then pressed harder. Then he released and pressed again. Sixty seconds of sharp pain from pressure-point stimulation was far superior to three days of debilitating agony from a migraine. Army doctors had prescribed Imitrex, Zolmitriptan nasal spray, and other medications, but they didn’t help, and instead, infused him with crippling fatigue. So Bennings had come to rely on acupuncture and acupressure to fight off the debilitating migraines.
“Massage” finished, he ran a hand through short-cropped, brown hair as coarse as steel wool and scratched his head vigorously, as if trying to wake up his brain. Tall without being too tall, fit without drawing attention to the fact, Kit had a narrow face, slightly crooked nose, and strong chin highlighting a visage that could blend in easily in Latin America, the Middle East, the West, Russia, or most anywhere, excluding Africa or Asia. And he had often done just that in the years he had spent conducting dangerous operations for a secret army unit originally designated ISA—Intelligence Support Activity. This secret detachment of fearless, highly-trained soldiers went out and gathered intelligence in harm’s way before the boys from Delta or DEV GRU—SEAL Team Six—went in to do their dirty business, although ISA had their share of “shooters,” too.
Sometimes, as during the raid to kill Bin Laden, ISA operatives worked hand-in-hand with Six or Delta or DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency agents or officers from the CIA’s SAD, Special Activities Division. The ISA folks made for some of the spookiest spooks, and while ISA wasn’t even their official name anymore, it didn’t matter: they were referred to by those in the know, usually in whispers, as simply, the Activity.
Kit Bennings felt tremendous pride in having achieved so much success as a member of the Activity. But tonight he was tired, and that could be seen in his most striking feature, his eyes. Even though brown is the most common color of all, his eyes simply… simmered. Not with rage but with intensity and luminosity. He could accuse, judge, and sentence a suspect in one brief glance. They cut like a diamond saw. Were they eagle eyes? Hawk eyes? They were the eyes of a predator, for sure, and when he directed them with intent upon a person, it was like having the red dot of a weapon’s laser pointing at your vitals.
Since his eyes could be a giveaway, a red flag to the opposition, he had to remember to smile to soften his gaze; or he had to look away to stay unnoticed by others, since his hard countenance was so physically intimidating. He could imply a malevolence in his stare that made men, even hard men, think twice about trying something.
In the past, friendly acquaintances who didn’t know the true nature of his work had felt reassured by simply being in Bennings’s presence, within the aura of his confident physicality, not knowing he was usually involved in something that could get himself and everyone around him killed.
After delivering a final scratch to his scalp, he slid open a drawer in the vanity and silently calculated: within a month, this Moscow duty would be over. The sacrifice on his part to pull off the counterintelligence operation could stop, and he seriously looked forward to that day. He wanted to get back to L.A. to see his mom and sister. He was worried about them; he was always worried about them since the demise of his dad and brother.
He let out an audible sigh, as if signaling some kind of transition, an acquiescence to the next phase of the evening’s activities, and then with delicate precision that belied his large hands and powerful forearms, he popped in green contact lenses, applied eyeliner, and tugged on a shaggy, dirty-blond wig. Then he crossed to an antique armoire and found the rest of tonight’s costume. He squeezed into tight black jeans and pulled on a slim-fit Maroon 5 T-shirt. Completing the transformation into some kind of quasi-goth hipster, he draped a red shoulder bag over his shoulder and lifted the trapdoor, ready to climb down to a dim netherworld, when his encrypted sat phone rang softly.